Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach (February 18, 1838 – February 19, 1916) was an Austrian-Czech physicist and philosopher and is the namesake for the "Mach number" and the optical illusion known as Mach bands.

Philosophy of science

Mach developed a philosophy of science which was influential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Related Topics:
Philosophy of science - Nineteenth - Twentieth

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Mach held that scientific laws are summaries of experimental events,

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constructed for the purpose of human comprehension of complex data.

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Thus scientific laws have more to do with the mind than with reality as it exists apart from the mind.

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Some quotations from Mach's writings will illustrate his philosophy.

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These selections are taken from his essay "The economical nature of physical inquiry", excerpted by Kockelmans (citation below).

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: The goal which it has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts.

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: When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it itself is only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically.

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: In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

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: In mentally separating a body from the changeable environment in which it moves, what we really do is to extricate a group of sensations on which our thoughts are fastened and which is of relatively greater stability than the others, from the stream of all our sensations.

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: Suppose we were to attribute to nature the property of producing like effects in like circumstances; just these like circumstances we should not know how to find. Nature exists once only. Our schematic mental imitation alone produces like events.

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In accordance with this philosophy,

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Mach opposed Ludwig Boltzmann and others who proposed an atomic theory of physics.

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Since atoms were, at the time, too small to observe directly,

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the atomic hypothesis seemed to Mach to be unwarranted by experimental observations,

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and perhaps not sufficiently "economical".

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Mach had a direct influence on the Vienna Circle philosophers and the school of logical positivism in general. Albert Einstein entitled him as forerunner of Theory of relativity.

Related Topics:
Vienna Circle - Logical positivism - Albert Einstein - Theory of relativity

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